Stand-off filament-induced ablation of gallium arsenide

Abstract

Using femtosecond filaments for the ablation of GaAs in air, we have observed that the diameter and volume of the resulting ablation craters remained almost constant with propagation distance. This constant mass removal along the propagation of a filament in both focused and non-focused configurations is valuable for applications such as material processing and stand-off laser-ablation based spectroscopy.